A girl from a conservative Pune family, on her birthday, lets her guard down at a Singapore nightclub. All hell breaks loose. A video of her doing a drunken "sandwich dance" between two scantily clad men goes viral and the arithmetic of the Physics teacher's life goes haywire.
Back in Pune, under pressure from priggish parents, the prim and proper school principal Kalyani Pandit (Bhagyashree) sacks the teacher, Sajini Shinde (Radhika Madan), and two others who were part of the unauthorised girls' trip.
Director Mikhil Musale, whose first Hindi film Made in China did not make the grade, demonstrates some of the Wrong Side Raju (the Gujarati film that he debuted with in 2016) form in Sajini Shinde Ka Viral Video. Some parts of the film are passable. Others flounder.
A cross between a social drama and a police procedural, the film, scripted by Musale, Parinda Joshi, Anu Singh Choudhary and Kshitij Patwardhan, addresses social media frenzy, slut shaming and patriarchy, pitting a young woman against a family and a society that will, even in this day and age, allow her no elbow room to be who she wants to be in her private life.
Pushed to a corner, the girl writes a note and names her father, theatre actor Suryakant Shinde (Subodh Bhave), and her fiance; Siddhant Kadam (Soham Majumdar) as her tormenters, and vanishes into thin air. Nobody knows if she has gone missing or has killed herself. The mystery thickens as contradictory clues begin to surface from the girl's past - and at the site of a dam.
Policewoman Bela Barud (Nimrat Kaur), herself a victim of unbridled sexism in the force that has relegated her to the women's cell because of her gender, investigates. For her, the prime suspects are Suryakant and Siddhant and her line of questioning indicates her constant desire to be regarded as a tough cop on par with her male colleagues.
One subordinate, Inspector Ram Pawar (Chinmay Mandlekar), does see her for the hard taskmaster that she is. He even saves her name as "Dooberman" in his phone book. The spelling error catches Bela's attention but she takes the appellation in her stride. After all isn't that what she aspires to be?
The cops are under pressure from Sajini's friend, a student counsellor (Shruti Vyas), who starts a social media campaign that garners a lot of support from the public. She and Bela call each other names, but nothing that the two to do gets them any closer to their goal of finding the truth behind Sajini's disappearance.
Parts of Sajini Shinde Ka Viral Video are gripping because the screenplay succeeds in getting the audience to care for Sajini although her family, including her docile mother Urmila (Sneha Raikar), thuggish brother Akash (Ashutosh Gaikwad) and her boyfriend appear not to be unduly perturbed at the turn of events.
Flashes of her interactions with her father and her fiance; (many of them seen via social media videos) bring to the fore facets of her life and personality that only strengthen Bela's suspicion that it is someone very close to Sajini who is the culprit.
The film sways between the predictable (mostly) and the unpredictable (rarely) as Bela and Ram ferret around for clues. Many are found, listed as serviceable evidence, if not a breakthrough.
Simultaneously, two lawyers (Sumeet Vyas and Kiran Karmarkar), one representing Siddhant, the other Suryakant, slug it out.
One man who sits in on these legal pow-wows, Suryakant's elder brother (Shashank Shende), not only stays on the sidelines but he comes off as a character who has been rustled up without much thought. He is meant to be the ugly face of patriarchy while Sajini's brother is masculinity gone awry but neither of the two figures add any genuine value to the plot.
.But as has already been said, Sajini Shinde Ka Viral Video is a marked improvement on Musale's Made in China. Yet, even with a reasonable 116-minute runtime, it seems a tad stretched and repetitious at times.
Musale, working in a setting outside of Gujarat for the first time, gets the Maharashtrian cultural and linguistic nuances right, using Pune's theatrical traditions as an effective backdrop for the character of an orthodox patriarch who allows his wife no agency, a fact that impacts all his other relationships.
The script also throws in a generous smattering of Marathi, which, as it transpires, is a language that Bela does not understand. She admits as much. She is told by Suryakant in so many words to do something about it - a nod to the native vs. outsider debate that isn't really what Sajini Shinde Ka Viral Video is about.
There are many other such elements that the film alludes to but does not stay with long enough for them to become an integral part of the narrative design.
It is Nimrat Kaur who saves the day with a solid, admirably consistent performance as the investigator who has much more on her plate than just a case of a missing girl. As long as she is in the thick of the action - it is another matter that the film is more verbiage than vigour - Sajini Shinde Ka Viral Video is watchable.
Bhagyashree, Soham Majumdar and Subodh Bhave deliver performances that provide the counterpoints to the actions and words that Sajini is forced to take recourse to in the days and months leading up to her disappearance.
However, Radhika Madan, playing Sajini Shinde, chews her words up in a way that makes many of her lines unintelligible. If the mumbles are meant to convey fragility and confusion, it isn't a good creative choice given that the film rests primarily on what the titular character has to articulate.
She and the film do have a lot to say, but it is only stray bits of the noise that Sajini Shinde Ka Viral Video makes in the service of its stance against patriarchy, social media toxicity and self-serving activism that make it through the dense haze of conflicting, problematic messaging, not the least of which is its unconscionably casual attitude to suicide.
Sporadically watchable primarily because of Nimrat Kaur and on occasional twist that hits home.
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Nimrat Kaur, Radhika Madan, Sumeet Vyas, Bhagyashree, Soham Majumdar
